GeForce GTX Titan vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 290, which has a core clock frequency of 800 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1250 MHz. It also makes use of a 512-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 2560 SPUs, 160 TAUs, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX Titan		10162 points
Radeon R9 290		9876 points
	Difference: 286 (3%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX Titan		250 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (20%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 is 11% quicker than the GeForce GTX Titan in general, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX Titan		288384 MB/sec
	Difference: 31616 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX Titan is a lot (more or less 46%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 290. (explain)

GeForce GTX Titan		187488 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 59488 (46%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be quite a bit (more or less 27%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX Titan, and also able to handle higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX Titan		40176 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11024 (27%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.